The Principal's Handbook

Building Collaborative Response Teams: A Framework for Supporting Every Student with Kurtis Hewson
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Principal's Handbook, your go to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work life balance, I'm Barb Flowers. We'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority.
Well, welcome everyone to the podcast. Today I have Curtis Hewson joining us and I'm excited to have him on the podcast because we are going to be talking about collaborative response. But first, Curtis, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and education and how you got to where you are?
You bet, Barb. An absolute pleasure to [00:01:00] be joining you in conversation today. So, I'm approaching my 30th year in education. I'm closer to that than to 25 now. And in that time, have worked as teacher, school administrator, I've taught at the post secondary level, and now, I engage in consulting work with school divisions across our home province of Alberta, Canada, , as well as other jurisdictions across Canada, United States.
, we've worked with schools in Iceland, New Zealand, around this collaborative response work that I'm sure we'll get in. It's, , not a path that was mapped out from graduation, but, , one that I definitely enjoy. And coming back to that fundamental purpose of How can we best support kids? That's always been the driving mantra for me is how do we make a difference?
And yeah, it's been an exciting journey to get to this point. Yeah. So talk to us about collaborative response and the work you've been doing in schools. So what is this? Okay, [00:02:00] so when I became the administrator, it was my third school coming in and a smaller school in Southern Alberta. What we were finding in our school is great teachers doing great things for students, but a lot of Isolated practice.
And what I mean by that is, this wasn't a staff that didn't get along. We helped, we supported one another, but our collaborative efforts weren't always focused. Um, we had students slipping through the cracks in this school and we needed to look at a different way of how could we organize ourselves effectively.
, we often reflect with a little bit of a smile that if you added up all of the years of experience working with students in that school, it would have been centuries. But we were not leveraging the collective expertise well. So we began work around really, um, digging into the professional learning communities, literature.
What does that look like? The, at that time, this was mid [00:03:00] 2000. So response to intervention was just starting to take hold in schools. And we were really thinking about how do we create. strong systems so that every child will have success and it's not dependent on their classroom placement, um, or the individual.
Responsibilities of our teachers. How could we be doing this collectively? So we began to put some structures in place that morphed and changed. Other schools began to ask what what was that we were doing as we were seeing not only significant increases for student achievement, but our staff, um, We didn't know the term at the time, but years later, through Hattie's research of collective efficacy, realized, oh my goodness, that's what we were feeling.
Just high levels of efficacy that were being experienced by the teachers and organically morphed from there. And other schools started to ask, well, how would we do this? Can you explain how you've set it up? And it became this [00:04:00] framework that we refer to now as collaborative response. And it's really, really.
intentionally designed and focused so that we are responding to the needs of every student in our building, but doing so in a way that's building the collective capacity of every adult through our our conversations. So you mentioned PLCs and RTI. So how does this compare to PLCs and RTI? Well, whenever we engage with schools, if schools have a background around professional learning communities and tiered supports or multi tiered systems of support, we've often heard, and we were just at a conference last week in Denver, where a school said, this is the missing piece, it's the piece that's not connecting between how do we ensure practices in our classrooms through our generalists with high degrees of connection to the, the specialists that are then working for students that need support beyond [00:05:00] the classroom.
So we talk about in collaborative response that really there's three foundational components. We have highly intentional layered collaborative structures and processes. That get established. And in that we talk about four layers of team that I can break down for you if you like. Um, that we see need to be in place in every school.
The second component is data and evidence. How do we utilize data and evidence to inform the conversations that are happening in those layers of team. And then our third component is developing continuums of support. So that we can have a really clear understanding. Of what do we do when a student struggles?
And one of our driving mantras in that component is we don't tear kids apart. We tier supports. So can we establish what are the tiered supports that are available in our school that we are going to ensure get put into place for students? I [00:06:00] love that that we don't tier kids. We tier supports because often kids do get grouped into, you know, this is kind of their level and then they're grouped in that for good versus like making it this flexible.
This is your tiered support. So I love that. Well, and one of the things that we found is we were tearing kids ourselves in our school, and it almost gave the. Ability to say, well, that student's a tier, whatever. So it's not really my responsibility now. And instead we want to say, no, the students are all of our responsibilities.
, but we're going to layer on the tiers as they need. And you're absolutely right is then we can be flexible. There's no such thing as a tier three kid. There's a student who right now needs tier three supports for their success. In addition to the other tiers that, that are in place for them. I know as a principal, one thing that I always faced was especially those students who might be identified as special education is sometimes their [00:07:00] tiered support seem to be less because of time and where the resources were put.
So I think this is such a huge issue. It's a systematic issue that. Really does need to be addressed in schools, making sure that those students who need the highest tier support actually are getting the better interventions and are getting that support that they need. Well, and what we found is until we had it clearly aligned, these layers of team and our tiers of support, we actually found we were pushing more and more students to more intensive supports because we didn't know what to do in the classroom to support.
And what we were finding is at that special education level, we were getting overwhelmed. We couldn't keep up with the number of referrals or the teachers that were saying, I've done everything. Someone else needs to now. Step in and in lots of cases, they were doing a lot of things, but we needed to really get clear on what are the differentiated practices we should see in the classroom before we ever involve [00:08:00] others to add a next layer of support.
It's not a handoff. It's a, , building of supports through these tears. Another important point you just brought up. It's not a handoff, and I think that that's building that school culture. These are all of our students and we continue to help students because that is something I've seen in schools as well is that it's , I want this student identified because then somebody else can work with them and not because teachers don't necessarily want to, I think it's this feeling of overwhelm, like they don't even have enough to do for that student, you know, enough time, enough resources, that sort of thing.
So talk to us a little bit about the four layers of the team, I'd love to know more about that. And. As I described these, we often see schools that go, Oh, my goodness, we have a number of these layers already in place, which should not come as a shock to anyone. So when we talk about These four layers of team.
I'll start from the least intensive and move to [00:09:00] most intensive. The first layer is we refer to it as collaborative planning, but any school that has strong PLC structures in place would say, okay, we have that layer accomplished the idea in collaborative planning is we're not necessarily looking at any.
individual student, but we're looking at overall cohorts, we're examining our data, we're seeing, you know, we're seeing this skill, lagging skill that we need to address, so how could we do that in our classroom? We're developing common plans and, and structures, but at that layer we're trying to engage in a layer of teacher collaboration that's going to impact So within my own school, , that layer for us were grade level teams.
We had two to three teachers per grade level. They met, they had, two blocks every week where they were meeting. They had goals that they were establishing based on data that they, , had examined. And every week they would be working on moving forward in those goals. It's very much aligned with the [00:10:00] traditional PLC.
So that's that first layer. The second layer, I'm going to come back to. I'll just leave it for a second. Our third layer, we refer to as school support team. And most schools, particularly within the U. S., would see this as that special education team that's coming together. We essentially say the school support team is mechanism where we're looking at students who need support beyond the classroom.
So in my own school, myself as principal, our assistant principal, our learning support teacher, and we had a family school liaison that we shared with a high school. The four of us met every week for an hour just to determine which students need More. Which ones were getting referred from the classroom, and what is it that we could be doing.
Then our fourth layer of team, we refer to it as case consult team meeting. But again, it's important to think of these as broad categories, not [00:11:00] exact names. The case consult was any time we are coming together with one student on the agenda. And we'll get the people who need to be involved based on the student and the situation that we are needing to look at.
Every school has this layer, , in their school, but I've worked with some larger high schools now where when they start holding up the meetings that they have, one in particular stood out where about 1, 200 students, when they held up their meetings that they were having against these layers, they went, Oh my goodness, we have.
Most of our conversations are fitting in that case consult layer, which is one student at a time, and in a school of 1, 200, you cannot respond one kid at a time. It's, you just don't have the time, resources, and it becomes confusing Overly reactive and what that school and lots that I've worked with have that feeling of overwhelm.
There's just, there's so many, [00:12:00] I've heard schools say it feels like we're playing whack a mole that student issues are coming and we're trying to respond as best we can, but we're overwhelmed. So within our school, we had these layers. We didn't understand how they all connected to one another yet, but something was missing because sometimes students would be getting referred.
Teachers would be saying, we've done everything, and it would be like we mentioned before, that handoff. And even in a school of, we had 350 students, we were feeling overwhelmed with the number of students that were, , coming to us. So we had built this, what we now refer to as the second layer, and we call it the collaborative team meeting.
And the idea is, , That we're going to bring teachers, but with specialists, administrators going to be involved, and we are going to engage in a conversation that is really specifically designed to help what could we be doing before we ever engage that next layer of team. So, the interesting thing in the collaborative team meeting [00:13:00] is we utilize a process, , that we refer to as, , establishing key issues.
And this is what it would look like, Barb. You would come and say, I've brought Marcus, and my key issue is, , lack of independence when working individually. Then what we would, we might have to articulate and, what do you mean by that? Get really clear on the key issue. And then we say, alright, for others in the room, who else has a student like that?
Name them, just the name, no story. And then we say, all right, what could we do in the classroom when it comes to students lacking independence, and everyone just starts brainstorming. And in time, we start developing these continuums of support so that we can be referencing and saying, have we tried this?
Have we done this? But we found that collaborative team meeting became the bridge of How do we build up everyone's capacity through the conversation to support students? And what we started to find over time is [00:14:00] less and less students started to get referred up to those higher levels of team because we were building so much capacity in the collaborative team meeting layer.
Really, What we were trying to do is build as much capacity and expertise at the classroom level so that we could respond to as many students as possible before needing to move beyond. It became a really powerful, , mechanism to, to engage in a really solutions based conversation that always led to, All right, now for the student.
Barb, you brought Marcus. What's one thing that you're going to try and take away? And in time, we started to say, teachers, you know, I'd like to try Curtis's idea, but I'm going to need help. I need someone to help me. Show what that looks like. So it became a really powerful form of professional learning and we often share that in the collaborative team meeting Everyone enters as an expert and a learner.
Everybody has expertise to contribute, but nobody [00:15:00] has all of the answers. There's always something that we can take away. And one of the things that you said that I think is key is the idea that Does anybody else have a student like this? Please don't share the story because I think often and I think about our PBIS.
We had PBIS team meetings where we kind of did something similar, but we focused on the one student and you could get in the weeds of all the nuances of that student and all the stories and. Sometimes it was like, well, you don't understand because it's this student and you get stuck in that versus looking at the overall issue.
Like you're saying, taking kind of that bird's eye view of, okay, here's the problem. Who else has this problem? What solutions can we give for that problem? I love that focus. And I'm the first to admit that the story of the student is really important, but not in the collaborative team meeting layer.
When we get to that fourth layer of the case consult, this is where I need to know the story of the [00:16:00] student, what's happened for the family, what are the things that we've tried that have worked that haven't, that's where we go into the weeds. But in the collaborative team meeting, the story actually hurts the process.
We're just, we often say, it looks like you're talking about kids. But you're really not. You're talking about practice to respond to a key issue being experienced across multiple classrooms. It's a really, really powerful approach. Yeah, and I think differentiating, like you said, between the two of when it's appropriate to get into the weeds and when it isn't, is a key to that because you can get so much more done when you focus on that and the behaviors happening.
And this is why the data and evidence component becomes highly valuable because we often say we're going to use the data and evidence to flag. Who we should bring to the collaborative team meeting. And it's not going to be our most at risk students. It's going to be students who our data are saying. is close.
These are students that are just on the bubble and what could we be doing in the [00:17:00] classroom that would have impact? And the interesting thing here is me trying something in the classroom for a student who was close that we may not have been paying attention to previous. That might be all they need to help, , them to achieve where we want them to get and to ensure that a year from now.
We're not having to talk about this student in depth because they've just continued to, , struggle, but we often refer to it as , our bubble kids are the ones that are just on the cusp. Those are the students we focus on in, on, in the collaborative team meeting. And when someone says, well, I want to talk about Curtis, but I can't narrow it to one key issue.
There's a ton of things going on in this kid's life. Then we say, okay, that's a conversation for the case consult layer. So getting really clear on those layers and its purpose is. what's critically important in this work. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see districts making when they're trying to implement [00:18:00] these collaborative response teams?
I think the first one is not getting clear with those layers of team and what's the purpose of each one. And like I say, where we're trying to come into that second layer of the collaborative team meeting, But talking about our most at risk students, that's typically one of the things that we see people struggle with first is we want to get really clear.
And then the second, and I'm a huge believer that collaboration doesn't happen just by accident, or we just naturally collaborate well. We need structures and processes in place, things like when we come into a meeting, what are the norms that we've established that we agree to attend to, what are the roles that each one of us are going to play.
The structure and the process, we often see schools, , struggle with it a little bit to start because it feels mechanical, it feels a bit awkward, and we'll have schools that say, well, [00:19:00] we don't really need These formalized structures, because we collaborate so well already, and any time we've introduced the structures and people have held to it with fidelity, it's like putting gasoline on an already burning fire.
Your collaborative efforts will become even more substantial if you attend to the structures and processes that are critical. Yeah, and I would argue too, like you're saying, I haven't met a team that doesn't need norms, right? We're all human. We all bring our biases to it and there can be negativity depending on that day and what's going on.
And I think just having a set of norms, even like you said, if it feels repetitive, if it feels like we're adults, we know this, just having that makes it a safe environment that people feel like. They can share and then that reminder is given, right? We need to be respectful. We need to be positive.
Just those sort of things, even though they're basic, can be really helpful for creating that positive collaborative culture. Well, and it's [00:20:00] small little nuances of, you know, one of our norms is we'll be solutions focused. Okay, so today let's practice that. Let's try and get 10 solutions. When, when we're talking about a key issue before we ever move to the what should we do, let's practice that norm.
And it's really hard to do that if you don't have it clearly articulated. I'd once heard a leader say, every team has norms. , it's just some are unspoken. Yeah. That's so true. And I had to work with one team. It was a PLC I was working with, , on having healthy conflict, you know, they did not want to bring up anything tough because it did, it would get kind of negative, but it was so the dynamic was so unhealthy because they just, it was like pushing anything confrontational to the side.
And so it was like you were walking on eggshells in the meeting. So yeah, even helping them have that like healthy conflict and it's okay to disagree and, and working through all of that, I think is super important. So the funny part of this Barb is, I I [00:21:00] heard Richard Dufour talk decades ago about the use of norms with teams.
And I was actually a leader. Uh, in my younger days, it went, well, we don't need those. We, we get along great. Those must be for big schools or for schools that they don't like one another. We love each other. We don't need norms. And it was true. We didn't need them. As long as our conversations were surface level.
As soon as we got into challenging, where in the meeting, it's not only , it's not only hoped for, but expected that I'm going to ask you questions about your practice, and I'm not doing that to be unprofessional , or judging. It's because we have norms that say we will dig into each other's practice to find out what's, as soon as we got into deeper, more challenging conversations.
We needed norms. Yeah. And the other thing you brought up that I think is such an important point about this is you talked about a building of 1, 200 and then you had a building of 350 people. I worked my first job, I was a title one tutor and [00:22:00] I. , was in a super small district. There were 80 kids per grade, but they did the dibbles assessment and 40 out of 80 were in red.
Yeah. So it does not matter what size of a district, like I could see this being helpful. At all stages, because we needed better tier one instruction, um, at that school. But I could see having these collaborative team conversations and getting better instruction in the classroom would have been so beneficial.
So I love that. Whether you have 1200 kids in your building or. Just a couple hundred like this framework can really be helpful for all students. The interesting thing is we've worked with this framework now with schools of 25 students in some very rural areas and schools of 2500 and the same principles and concepts apply even in that school where there's three staff members.
You still want lay those four layers of team. Yeah, it might all happen in the same meeting. And we've seen schools [00:23:00] that, you know, we meet for a half day and the first part of our meeting, we're engaging in some collaborative planning and looking at our data. The second part of our meeting, we're doing the collaborative team meeting, the key issue.
And then, The last part of our meeting, we'll talk about individual students that we need to dig deeper on. All those layers are still represented. And then in a large high school, I mentioned that third layer of the school support team. I've worked with schools that don't have a school support team, they have multiple.
One school I can think of, there was a grade 10 team, a grade 11 team, a grade 12 team. Then there was also a counseling team that was focusing on just students with well being issues. They had multiple teams at that particular layer working in the school. Yeah, I never thought about having the multiple layers even in one meeting.
That's a great way to think about it in a smaller school where, you know, you might all be part of that team. And separating your meeting into those layers, looking at it from bigger picture to smaller picture. Well, [00:24:00] the interesting thing for the school I have in mind with that, so you said it's the same people in every meeting, but we still have to get really clear on what's the purpose for this.
45 minute part of our time together, this 30, whatever that looked like breaking the agenda apart with real intentionality and clarity, and we don't have time to go into it today, but what we then start to see is those layers of teams start to connect to the tiers of support so that when we're engaging in collaborative planning, we're really building out what are our.
Tier one, um, supports and structures are a classroom pedagogy that we would see in, in collaborative response. We work with four layer or four tiers. And it's not that we added one more on top of a traditional three tier model. It's that we took tier one and broke it apart with high degree of fidelity to be able to say at tier one, what are the non negotiables?
What are the things we all agree we will see in every [00:25:00] classroom to ensure student success? Tier two, then, which is still part of universal is, well, what are the differentiated strategies that we would see for some students, some of the time in some classrooms? These are not must dos, but they're considerations that we want to ensure we've exhausted before we ever look at tier three, which are the supports that exist beyond the classroom.
And then tier four being the supports provided by someone external to the school. So again, tiering the supports becomes really valuable, and it starts to align to those four layers of team. So Curtis, you shared a lot of good information today about collaborative response, and I know I've been on your website, you have a lot of great resources on there as well.
So where can people find more resources, get in touch with you if they want to learn more about it, , , and want to start incorporating it into their school? Yeah, the best place to go is our website, which is jigsawlearning. ca. On there, we have oodles of, , workshops, [00:26:00] webinars, , res different resources.
I'll also share with you, if it's, , appropriate to put into the show notes, a overview of collaborative response. It's a short article, and I'll also share with you, we have the introductory chapter of our book that came out, , just in the last year from Corwin. That introductory chapter is free to download to be able to learn more as well.
I often say the collaborative response framework, it's simple in design, highly complex in actualization. So yeah, I really encourage listeners to Access , those resources, visit jigsawlearning. ca and reach out if there's questions or any way that we can help. Yeah. And I'll definitely put all of that in the show notes as well.
So people can find it there. Well, thanks so much for being on today. It was great meeting you and hearing all about all the good work you're doing in schools. Thanks so much, Barb. It's been a pleasure.
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